Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

Whereas Freud believed that people are driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain (his famous pleasure principle), Frankl maintained that people's primary drive isn't toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives.

Wendell says that if I've been taking such copious notes during our phone calls, I probably haven't been able to listen to Boyfriend, and if my goal is to be open to understanding his perspective, that's hard to do when I'm trying to prove a point rather than have an interaction in earnest. And, he adds, I'm doing the same thing to him in our sessions.

It's Wendell's job to help me edit my story. All therapists do this: What material is extraneous? Are the supporting characters important or a distraction? Is the story advancing or is the protagonist going in circles? Do the plot points reveal a theme?

Mas do que temos tanto medo? Não é como se fossemos espiar naqueles cantos escuros, acender a luz e descobrir um bando de baratas. Os vagalumes também adoram a escuridão. Existe beleza nesses lugares. Mas é preciso olhar ali dentro para vê-la.

anymore." I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because it's more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place. During

At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we'll never know why.

Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way. A lot can happen in the space of a step.

There's a difference between pain and suffering. You're going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don't have to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering.

Lately I've been anxious about pretty much everything. Even little things like making small commitments have left me paralyzed. I've become cautious, afraid of taking risks and making mistakes because I've made so many already and I fear I won't have time to clean up the mistakes anymore.

Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

And visit they will, because everyone has demons—big, small, old, new, quiet, loud, whatever. These shared demons are testament to the fact that we aren't such outliers after all.

It's easy to conflate the intimate experience of romance or sex with the intimate experience of having somebody pay undivided attention to the details of your life, accept you fully, support you without competing agendas, and know you so deeply.

She'd choose awkward over ignored. "What do you wish people would say?" I ask. Julie thinks about this. "They can say, 'I'm so sorry.' They can say, 'How can I be helpful?' Or 'I feel so helpless but I care about you.'" She shifts on the couch, her thinner frame not quite filling out her clothes.

I wonder why I seem to be more curious about you than you are about yourself?

They may not be able to imagine their depression lifting anytime soon, but they don't need to. Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one.

Why are we essentially outsourcing the thing that defines us as people?" Turkle asked in the video. Her question made me wonder: Was it that people couldn't tolerate being alone or that they couldn't tolerate being with other people?

That's one explanation," I said. "But another is that you've hidden yourself from him so deliberately and for so long that he needs some time to take in this new part of the picture. He kissed you in the parking lot, poured his heart out to you, and you've avoided him ever since. And now he gets this letter. That is a lot to absorb.

I've noticed that dreams can be a precursor to self-confession – a kind of pre-confession.

People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don't know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: "Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it." Fromm was right; people didn't use extra time earned to relax or connect with friends or family. Instead, they tried to cram more in.

the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.

Sometimes a therapist will deliberately "prescribe the problem" or symptom that the patient wants to resolve. A young man who keeps putting off finding a job might be told in therapy that he can't look for a job; a woman who won't initiate sex with her partner might be told not to initiate it for a month. This strategy, in which the therapist instructs patients not to do what they're already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention

A lot can happen in the space of a step.

Across the country—at coffee with friends, in meetings at work, during lunch at school, in front of the cashier at Target, and at the family dinner table—people were texting and Tweeting and shopping, sometimes pretending to make eye contact and sometimes not even bothering.